Those Blurry Old Photographs - A Sepia Saturday Post

I'm thrilled!  How else could one share all the horrible photographs in an ancestor's collection but for a Sepia Saturday when the theme for the week is less than perfect photographs:  blurred, scratched, undefined, etc.  My collection of photographs spills over with images such as these.  Let's begin!

Who could throw away a photo like this?  Certainly not my mother.  I haven't thrown it away either because, let's face it, when else will I have a photo of a curtain frame with my father's cousin, Evie Leathers McClelland, attaching a lace curtain to it to dry?  This is the only photo of Evie that I have -- though I only know it's her because my mom told me.  (I may have guessed what she was doing even if I hadn't been told.)  It seems strange that she had guests and was doing house work, unless my parents dropped in unexpectedly.

Do you remember curtain frames with tiny nails or tacks around the edges?  After a gentle wash the edges of the lace curtains were pinned to the frame to block them to prevent shrinkage and to ensure they kept their shape.

Those Brownie cameras ensured ease in the taking of photographs but there was no guarantee how good (or bad) the photos would be.  There were so many variables -- light, angle, focus, frame, holding the camera steady. . . .

Next up is a photo of my mom on our back porch.  I can't throw this away because it says so much about the home where I grew up.  We often sat on the porch steps when I was a child, either taking a rest from a hot summer game, watching others play, or sitting with others to visit.  The porch steps were a gathering place.  And then there's the little clothesline with what look to be towels hanging there.  There's the broom to the right of the door, standing on it's handle so as not to warp the bristles.  All so familiar.  Besides all that, the porch was sometimes our fort, our store, our kitchen, our school room when we children played pretend.

Guaranteed my mom didn't take this one so she's not the only bad photographer in our family.

There are blurred photographs of couples and groups, . . .

. . . photos of pets and children, . . .

. . . and those early color photos whose color degraded to some ugly shades and tones.

These are just a few of my "treasures."  As bad as they are my mother kept them and I'm keeping them, too.  Not on paper, at least not yet, but digital images stored for possible future use (I've already used them once, today!) and because they are images of family members. 

There's no help for the blurred photos but the crooked photos, the ones that are too light or too dark, and the ones whose color has faded may be helped with the magic of a digital photo program.  I wish these were the only bad ones in among all the photos I've gathered but, sadly, they're not.  They make me extremely grateful for the good photographs!

This post was written as a contribution to Sepia Saturday #197.  Click through if you'd like to see more blurred, out-of-focus, poor photographs and read what others are saying about them.

--Nancy.
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